I04 



Back to the start once more, and to telephone the French 

 Consul in Durban just to see. From the Post Office a message, 

 sorry no reply, and too late to do any more. So there I was, 

 baffled, unhappy, in some ways bewildered, my mind not yet 

 settled clearly on any definite course of action. 



Lost in a maze of uncertainties I went to the cabin, to the first 

 of a series of restless, virtually sleepless, nights. As I rolled and 

 tossed I could see that fish in the humid heat of the Comores, 

 Hunt trying to turn a responsive nose away from the mounting 

 odour. Was it a Coelacanth, anyway? What a fool I should be 

 troubling Cabinet Ministers if it wasn't. Hunt had been excep- 

 tionally interested and persistent, and my wife was quite confi- 

 dent he would know a Coelacanth if he saw one, but, all the same, 

 people far more expert than he had made mistakes of that kind. 



' Five-foot Coelacanth.' Size does make a difference, and it 

 certainly was a comfort that this fish was about the same size as 

 the one at East London. Now if Hunt had cabled that he had a 

 Coelacanth 5 inches long, how much less certain it would be, but 

 also how much less trouble, because he could have put it in a bottle 

 and sent it by post, without saying anything to anybody, without 

 my having to think of troubling anyone for a plane. And yet, it 

 was queer how everything has its points, nothing is a hundred 

 per cent. Size is important, very important. An elephant is far 

 more exciting than even a rare Peripatus. If you asked the average 

 man if he would like his son to be a hefty 6-footer, with perpetual 

 difficulty in finding clothes to fit him, or a 5 -foot skinny runt, 

 you knew the answer. If the original Coelacanth had been only 

 5 inches long it would not have stirred public imagination a 

 fraction as much. People would have looked at it and said, 'Oh 

 that ! Well now, fancy all that fuss about a little bit of a thing like 

 that. H'm !' And they would have gone away with the unspoken 

 thought, 'These scientists !' But a solid great thumping 5 -foot 

 fish; now that gives one a feeling of satisfaction. That is at any 

 time something worth looking at, and when it is a living fossil and 

 a phenomenon as well — well ! 



I woke with a start from an awful confused nightmare about a 

 Coelacanth at the Comores and a dreadful fear that it would 

 probably be putrid before I could get there to save it ; and then I 

 realised it was no dream, but real and true. 



